Tag: random

This evening I was cleaning raw chicken so we could bag it and freeze it. When I was done I went to throw away the remnants and to my surprise found a suspiciously new-looking laptop, slightly busted up and sitting in the dumpster on top of everything else:

The protective plastic on the top of the lid was still adhered, and it has fairly decent specs with a “Windows 7” sticker. It doesn’t look worn, just busted. The little pink sticker on it has the date 3-21-10, the words “Best Buy”, and the number 134 (the enhanced image of the sticker is on the left):

It just so happens that the closest Best Buy, in Dublin, is store number 134. Seems to me that someone stole a display model laptop, managed to bust it up, and decided to throw it out (which is illegal in and of itself due to the e-recycling laws). The thief destroyed the screen, but was apparently not smart enough to take out the RAM, or hard drive, or DVD drive, or battery and try to sell them.

I called the police department and reported it. They were supposed to be sending an officer by to pick it up sometime this evening, but it’s 10:00 now and I don’t think they’re coming (** Update: The officer came by and picked it up, and it was the same officer Jess did a ride-along with for her training. **). It looks like this model is currently retailing for about $500. Jess won’t let me mess with it anymore (after looking to see if the RAM and hard drive were there), but maybe the person was also stupid enough to take some pictures of themselves with the integrated webcam before breaking it.

Following a headline from CNN’s website I read this article: Winter weather causes 50 car pile-up. The article was scant on details, but for some reason I’m skeptical that it’s really the fault of the weather that this massive pile up occurred. Seems to me the headline should read something like “Crappy driving results in 50-car pile-up during slippery road conditions”.

My favorite part of the article, however, is at the bottom:

The crash happened right in front of WAVY News 10’s Lori Crouch and photojournalist Matt Mrozinski. They watched as accident victims went to check on others.

“Our employees sat around and did nothing while other people made sure no one was seriously injured. More at eleven.”

Both of our laptops suffered unfortunate deaths over the last few months. Well, mine died way back in the spring, and Jess’ was suffering from a degenerative condition resulting in it being mostly inoperable. I held on to my laptop because most of the pieces were still good, so it seemed a shame to just get rid of them. Now that both the computers were dead, I decided it was time to get rid of the pieces. So I dismantled all the usable stuff (memory, batteries, optical drives, whatever). I looked on eBay and decided it wasn’t worth trying to sell any of it so I listed it for free on Craigslist. The posting starts out like this:

My laptop died a couple of months ago, and my wife’s died last month. So I have a couple handfuls of parts to get rid of. They don’t seem to be worth trying to sell on ebay, so I’m offering them up for free here.

Apparently, some of the people missed the possessive on “wife”. I received these replies:

From Keith:

So sorry to hear about your wife….but life must go on….

From Lorimer (in the form of an eCard with a picture of flowers!):

I’m so sorry to hear that your wife is in a better place now. I hope she had a good life. My sincere condolence.

As for the laptop parts that you’re giving away on Craigslist, if it’s okay with you, I would like to take them all off your hand in light of relieving some of the burdens off your shoulder

We had this for dinner at some point. Doesn’t it look tasty?